Hugo Chávez Died an Irrelevant Dictator

Among American politicians, the death of Hugo Chávez has provoked a mixed response. Representative Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas, provided a Latin tag, "sic semper tyrannis," before cheering the news. Representative Cotton may be aware that the phrase is the motto of the state seal of Virginia, but I assume he's ignorant that "sic semper tyrannis" — thus ever to tyrants — was what John Wilkes Booth shouted after he shot Lincoln, and that therefore he was comparing Chávez to the great American liberator. Representative Jose Serrano, Democrat from New York, offered a different verdict on the man: "At his core he was a man who came from very little and used his unique talents and gifts to try to lift up the people and the communities that reflected his impoverished roots." Chávez was a complicated man, straight out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel, and there are points on both sides to be sure. Although only so far. Whatever his intentions, he imprisoned judges and banned journalists from offensive speech and refused human rights inspectors access to Venezuela. I know which side I'm on.

Since the Castros more or less faded from view, Chávez was the last of the truly bombastic railers against "gringo imperialism." It sounded incredibly antiquated at the time — Chávez put a lot of stock in appealing to the historical figure of Bolivar — but now it seems positively from another era. For one thing, America is getting its ass handed to it in the global economy. Go ask the people of Detroit or Baltimore how America's free trade policies are working out for them. But more importantly, there is such an obvious other strategy to beating America. China. They don't rant and rave at all. They just buy up American bonds at a staggering rate.

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The iconography of America the Imperialist, at least as Chávez imagined it, is no longer meaningful. Americans are not John Foster Dulles anymore. One of the stranger things that has happened since Chávez took office in 1999 is that America has become legitimately one of the most progressive countries in the world. Not only does the advent of a mixed-race president skew the old image, but also the fact that, among Western countries anyway, the United States is the only country that has chosen Keynesian counter-cyclical economic policies rather than neoliberal austerity. America is the only Western democracy currently expanding its social safety net. What other government in the world is even talking about introducing government-sponsored universal early childhood education?

Obama is, if anything, more imperialistic than his predecessors. He has explicitly argued that it is legitimate for America to assassinate anybody in the world, without trail, on the suspicion that they are a threat to the United States. America is behaving imperially, just not the way that the diseased imagination of Hugo Chávez believed. So far, only ten foreign leaders have said they will be attending his funeral, and they're all, except for Ahmadinejad, from neighboring countries who couldn't really not show up. Chávez has suffered the worst indignity for a bombastic dictator. He died irrelevant.

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